Research Objective
Once we knew that we were heading in the direction of student loans, we were able to synthesize our research.
Secondary Research
Findings from our secondary research revealed these hypotheses:

Primary Research
All this secondary research was great, but we needed to talk to our users to truly understand who we were designing for. So, we conducted a two part contextual study with 7 participants in our user group with the goals to understand:
- Financial Education and History(e.g. Growing up, what was financial education like)
- Student Loan Experience(e.g. What was your decision making process like before taking out a student loan?)
- Future Plans(e.g. Do you have plans in place to pay off your student loans?)
- Feelings about loans(e.g. How would you describe how you feel about student loans now?)
After the initial interviews, our synthesis looked like this:


Diary Study
The second part of the contextual study was made up of a 3 day design probe diary study exercise that consisted of:
- Finance tracking
- Resource allocation
- Student loan payment structure
We used Google Slides to have participants actively engage in finance reflection. I took the lead in designing these probes in a way that was accessible to our participants and made use of Google Slides’ capabilities.

The insights that we formed after the design probe were:

This helped us to form our How Might We question...